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Saturday, February 5, 2011

Hamster Powered Walker

I recently blogged about being in Gakken magazine, and mentioned that I have ideas to hack the mini wind powered Strandbeest that comes with it. Well I am happy to say that it worked! I give you, the Hamster Powered Strandbeest.

In the magazine, Gakken had converted the mini strandbeest into almost everything imaginable, including solar power, rubber band powered, and even micro processor control. So of course I thought about steam power, but quickly decided that it would be more pain than I'm willing to suffer. Plastic does not like heat very much, and the kind of weight a steam plant intruduces, would be a nightmare for this kit. If it was much bigger and stronger, I probably would have done it, but thankfully, I had another even sillier idea.

The hamster powered? that's just stupid, which is the exact reason why I did it. It's different, hasn't been done before, yet it's in so many what's-under-the-hood jokes. It also had a high likelyhood of working, so I had to attempt it. Only problem: I don't have a hamster, I don't want a hamster for a pet, and I don't know what sort of power and weight a little critter like that has. All I know is that I've seen them go ballistic on the hamster wheel, and so they must have great weight to power ratio.

Original Gakken Strandbeest, gears and fan removed

I quickly removed the gearing and windmill, cut some plastic and mounted a hamster ball to this contraption. I used ball bearings on the hamster ball axels, and mecanno sprockets/chain to transfer the power from the hamster ball to the main crank. I did some initial testing with my son's motorized train inside of the hamster ball, so I had fair confidence on the gear ratio needed for it to work.

Then my sister in law (who runs a great craft blog, Crafty Carnival) came to the rescue, and was able to borrow one of her friend's pet hamster. Enter Princess the Hamster. Princess is a tiny little thing, much smaller than what I had imagined and prepared for. I was afriad that her weight wouldn't be enough to get the ball going. But luckily it all worked out great, and test pilot Princess had no problems getting the strandbeest up to speed.

When the cat walked in, I expected that it would provide some motivation on both parties, but they didn't really cared about each other. In fact, Princess kept going towards to cat, and eventually the cat just lost interest and walked away. Anyway check out the video, and a special thanks to Princess, and her owner for letting me borrow her for a few minutes! Now the nieces (two girls in the video) wants their own hamster, so I may get some more test pilots in the near future ;)

edit:
Princess and the walker has made it into the current issue of MAKE Magazine! and a brief appearance on TV Asahi's Torihada in Japan!

This actually has serious commercial potential, perhaps with just a simple geared down wheel set instead of the Strandbeest mechanism.

One of the problems with Hamsters in balls is they're pretty quick, and they tend to get caught in things very frequently (under chairs, cabinet kickspaces, etc.) You're constantly having to follow them around and "unstick" them.

This gears down the hamster and makes it taller, so it's much less likely to get stuck. Post it on Kickstarter and some hampster forums...you may have something here.

These hamsterballs are not good for the hamsters!They feel exposed and are under pure stress, as they can not escape and hide.Also, the balls are way too small so that the hamsters spine is flexed too hard.

Now that is just too cool! You need to spray paint the legs and then distress the paint to make it look like worn rusted iron. Video tape the Hamster Beast moving in an apocalyptic setting. Nerd meter pinned!